By Grace King, 11 Alive

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — Inside the Fulton County Government Center, business is back to normal. The "major system outage alert" signs are down and the phones are once again ringing, leaving few visible signs of the ransomware attack that essentially halted business in Georgia's most populous county last January.

The county has invested in new trainings, new technology and extra places to store its information. But Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told 11Alive the potential threat of another attack is here to stay.

"You're never fully protected, because these are very, very, very sophisticated operations," he said. "This is how they make their living, and so they are always one step ahead of people."

The hackers, identified as "Lockbit," demanded millions of dollars from the county. Pitts said they couldn't stomach spending taxpayer dollars on a ransom.

"It's the taxpayers' money. It's not the Board of Commissioners money," he said. "We could not play footloose and fancy feet with the taxpayers money... the answer from day one was: absolutely not."

He said he hopes that decision will become state law to discourage cyber criminals from targeting Fulton County again, or anywhere else in Georgia.

"I'll be asking the state to pass a law that will prohibit any governmental entity from paying a ransom, because the theory is that if the bad actors know that, they won't waste time trying to force people to pay," Pitts said. "I'm excited about that piece of legislation we'll be having introduced this year, hopefully passed by the Georgia General Assembly."

In the meantime, the county will continue evaluating its cyber practices to try and stay ahead of the cyber criminals.